Lethe
by Mein Liebling
Summary: He's ten and ninety simultaneously, his mother was murdered and his sister is a stranger. He's got a deck of cards that he holds onto like a lifeline and an Italian-English dictionary that's old as hell and crumbling, but it's not as old as he is, and that makes him laugh. :: AU
1. Chapter 1

lethe

 _what if_

 **nico di angelo**

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* * *

.

Bianca is shoved into the river first.

The river wasn't pretty. It had faces streaming through its current, its roars were no more of it smashing against the rocks then screams for help. There were bodies at the bottom and pairs of shoes left on the riverbank.

Bianca fights against the water for a few seconds, but Nico watches as her eyes widen underwater but close just as quickly. Bianca is different when she's picked out by the lawyer, who grabs Bianca's arm and pulls her out just as roughly as Bianca was thrown in. Bianca was soaked to the bone with her clothes dripping milky white water onto the ground around her, her smile was the one she always wore when something hadn't gone her way; something settles in Nico's stomach that made him feel like he swallowed a rock.

Something wasn't _right._

The lawyer came toward Nico next, and Nico stepped back once to avoid her. "W-What's this river called?" He sputtered out, staring at Bianca from over the lawyer's shoulder. He didn't know what was wrong with the river, he didn't want to come out like Bianca did.

The lawyer hissed.

(Nico had a feeling she wasn't _actually_ a lawyer.)

"Lethe," was the short answer, and Nico didn't have time to move away again before two clawed hands grabbed his shoulders and shoved him in.

The river _burned._

It felt like there were hands grabbing him and nails dragging across his skin. The river got into his mouth, eyes, drowning him, and kept screaming in his ears, " _Forget! Forget!"_

Nico didn't want to forget- he didn't even know what he was _supposed_ to forget.

(It was almost that easy, for Nico to give it the insignificant memories, the ones where if he had to give up any, he'd gladly get rid of them. The river made him forget his favorite color, the last meal he ate, useless memories it wants, but it didn't push for all his memories and it only pushed for a few, so Nico let it have those. Nico thought it was just that easy. _**It wasn't.**_ )

The lawyer grabbed him by his leg, and Nico could breathe again.

.

* * *

.

The hotel feels like a dream, and Nico thinks it is.

His room he shares with Bianca, with two beds and a view, is too nice to be real. He didn't know how he got there, he didn't know what day it was, but whenever he asked Bianca she shrugged as well.

"I don't know." became a familiar answer.

It could have been a week, probably a month (Nico thinks it's a month) of running around and having fun. Everyday there seemed to be something new, and people were always coming in, but never leaving.

(Nico thought it was quite peculiar, but never mentioned it.)

There were new games to play, a waterslide, movies and food and drinks- when the lawyer comes to get them, the same one who pushed Nico and his sister into a river for some reason Nico still can't decipher, he doesn't want to leave with her.

Bianca is on his side.

The lawyer just hisses again, that same strange hiss that makes his arm hair stand up, and she grabs Nico and Bianca by the shoulder and leads them out. He doesn't remember what came next. Perhaps they were in a car? Plane? It was all a fuzzy blur, but then suddenly Nico and Bianca were at a military school in Maine (weren't they in New York before? He wasn't sure) and then the lawyer was gone.

Boys are on one side, girls on the other, and Nico and Bianca separated.

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* * *

.

It doesn't take long for Nico to be set on edge.

The lights are nice, very nice, nicer and brighter and more clean than any Nico has seen before, in Italy or New York or otherwise. There's some kind of clock on his bed that has numbers instead of a face, and there's a cord connecting it to the wall that Nico can plug and unplug and which seems to turn the clock on and off, and Nico's just as confused about the switches on the wall as he is the slits that admit heat and air on the floor and ceiling.

(It's a good thing that he had his own room.)

They haven't started school yet, but he has a tourguide come to his room, a kid his age, with a name and face forgettable. He's shown around the school; the classrooms, the gardens, the cafeteria, and Nico wants to blurt out so many questions but he holds his tongue.

His gut hadn't failed him yet, and he figured asking " _What are those strange contraptions on the walls?"_ would make him stand out far more than he'd like.

Nico's brought to the library, and while Nico is lost among the books, his tour guide leaves him.

It's probably for the best.

Nico sits down at the table in the back, with three fictional books he had picked out, and started to read. He's five sentences in before he stumbles on an unfamiliar word- he doesn't know if it's new slang or what, so he wanders around the library looking for an Italian-English dictionary (Bianca had picked up the language easier than he had) and ends up stumbling onto the librarian and the newspaper section.

He takes one look at the date of the newest paper in the librarian's hands, and turns back to the shelves, towards the history section.

(He wondered if the date _August 23, 2010_ was just a joke, but he knew it couldn't be.)

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* * *

.

Nico stops Bianca that night at dinner, and pulls her to the library.

"Nico, what are you doing?" She asked him quickly, in Italian, glancing over her shoulder at the girls huddled by the entry staircase.

"Do you know what today's date is?" Nico demanded, showing her his table full of history books that he admittedly hadn't read more than a couple sentences in. He just wished they were in Italian.

Bianca gave him a funny look. "What does it matter?"

"It's 2010." Nico breathed. "Bianca, it's _2010."_

"And?" Her forehead wrinkled.

Nico's mouth dropped open, and his own eyebrows furrowed together. "We're in the future! Somehow we're in 2010, and that explains so much of it, doesn't it? Like the lights, the drinks, what those strange machines were in the dining room-" His hands waved around, the more excited he had got. "I don't know how we got here, are we even here? But this is strange-"

"Nico, I don't know what you're talking about."

He froze. "What?"

"We haven't time traveled."

" _What?"_ Nico repeated just as blandly.

"Nothing like that has happened." Bianca shook her head, glancing over at him before back at the door. "We've always been here. We've lived our entire lives with those things, Nico."

"But then what about Mama?" Nico got angry. "How can you say that? The building exploded and then Papa sent us with that lawyer and now somehow we're here-"

"Mama died in a car crash!" Bianca slammed her hands on the table. "We don't have a dad!"

 _(What does Lethe mean?)_

Nico was speechless for a couple of seconds, just long enough for Bianca to breath out loudly and turn on her heel towards the door.

"We were born in 2000, and 1998, Nico. Whatever you're doing that's making you think otherwise, _stop it."_ She left, slamming the door of the library behind her.

Nico looked down at the books in front of him, and gathered them up his arms.

"Can I check these out?" He asked quietly to the disgruntled librarian, who had watched them the entire time, although not understanding what their fight was about.

"History books?" One eyebrow flew up. "Interesting read."

Nico gave her a closed mouth smile.

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* * *

.

Lethe, Nico found out, was the River Lethe in Greek mythology. It was the river of forgetfulness and concealment.

(It was very suspicious; a puzzle piece slid into place.)

There was a lot that Nico had to learn about the past century.

There was a lot that he had to remember.

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* * *

.

When school started, Bianca kept up easily. It was almost like the information the teachers were sprouting out was just automatically inputted into her brain. She knew algebra, geometry, the history of the Vietnam War, Harry Potter, the discovery of evolution and even the _polio vaccine._

When Nico heard about that from her, when he briefly stopped her and asked her about her classes and she cooly responded with the fact, his brain short circuited. There was no _polio vaccine._

School began the day after their fight, and Nico was having trouble keeping up.

Math came easily for him, and math was logical. Math didn't _change._ Numbers were the same in every century. History was the United States history, and although Nico was clueless about a lot of the finer details, he knew some of it from what his mother and father had told him on the brief times they'd touched upon the subject. Literature, English, wasn't too bad. Short stories by people who were younger than him yet sixty-five made his head hurt, but there was always something he could grab onto with dear life and stay with that to make it through the book.

Science had him in tears.

He knew everything up to 1940- all the scientific discoveries, all the finer laws- Maria was a busy actress with a lot of money to her name that she used on her kids, and Nico remembered his lessons with his tutors like they were weeks ago.

(Technically, to him, they were less than two months ago.)

Nico knew penicillin. It was the newest thing that was going to save millions of lives. But then there was something called _DNA,_ and the _polio vaccine,_ and _cellular reactions_ ; _cloning,_ a new _planet, dark energy,_ and _stem cells,_ and Nico set his head in his hands the second he heard of humans on the moon, and waited until he heard the dismissal of the bell.

It wasn't possible, it couldn't be possible, and yet it _was._

Nico felt reality hit him like a brick wall.

 _This can't be real._

 _This can't be_ possible.

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* * *

.

Nico's next door neighbor was a boy with red hair and freckles and a terrible habit of stuttering, but Nico found him enjoyable to be around none the less.

His name was Anthony and he played _Mythomagic,_ and Nico looked at the game and at his old history textbooks that he couldn't quite read, not with the lack of translator, and decided to play.

Nico thought this was one of his better moves.

There were things like _attack points,_ and _skill levels,_ and Nico didn't care quite so much about that as he did listening to Anthony go on about the Gods and Goddesses.

"So what about Hades?" Nico asked.

"Hades is s-super powerful!" Anthony squealed. "He's the Lord of the Dead, and he rules the underworld!"

"Underworld?"

"Yeah! T-There are a bunch of places where the dead go- like p-punishments and islands where you can be reborn; that's what I've read a-anyways."

Nico's gut stirred. "Any rivers down there?"

Anthony's forehead wrinkled. "I m-mean, there could be?" He seemed curious for a second, before taking out something small and rectangular from his pocket. Nico's eyes widened substantially at it, as Anthony caught him looking at it.

"I k-know, cool isn't it?" Anthony beamed. "My m-mom got me the newest version before I c-came to school."

"That's nice of her." Nico said blankly, eyes still trained on the small device.

 _Was that a phone?_

There was a second where Anthony was reading something, before he nodded to himself. "A-According to this site, there _are_ rivers in the Underworld!" Anthony seemed pleased. "There's Cocytus, P-Phlegethon, Styx, Lethe, and Acheron."

"Fascinating."

"I think it is." Anthony put away his phone. "S-So what were we t-talking about? O-Oh! Hades! I l-like him, he's pretty cool you know-"

Nico couldn't remember what his dad's name was, and Nico thought that was awfully suspicious.

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* * *

 **.**

Nico spends the free time after school on his second day in the library.

He stumbles around the empty library for an hour, looking at all the dusty tall books that he'd never make a head or two of, before he resigned defeat and went up to the librarian and asked, "Excuse me, do you have any Italian to English dictionaries?"

The librarian peered at him from over her small nose, and she looked almost like the lawyer for a second with that stare that Nico half expected her to start hissing, before she turned to the odd giant machine in front of her and typed something in.

(It was like an advanced typewriter, Nico figured, but he resigned himself to researching the inventions of the past century.)

"We do happen to have one." She glanced at him. "You're in luck. I'll grab it for you, it's in the back on the top shelf."

 _Figures._

Nico watched her as she grabbed a ladder and took a thick black book off the shelf, the words on it's spine rubbed off with age, and Nico thought with both amusement and bemusement, _this book is probably younger than me._

She handed it to him and went back to the desk, picking up the newest newspaper _(August 25, 2007)_ and went back to ignoring him.

Nico was fine with that.

He took the book with him back to his room, after using the small checkout station that was next to the librarian's desk (it took him a few tries), and sat down on his bedroom floor with the first history book in front of him, and began to read.

Three hours got him three chapters in, and half of the things he read about the war made it seem so _far away._

He knew Mussolini. He _met_ the man, at one of the galas or balls his mother sang at or was invited to, and he couldn't connect the smiling man who shook his hand and made his mother blush to the man who murdered thousands and was subsequently shot to death, then stoned, spat upon, hung up, and defaced. It made it seem unreal, farfetched, that the soldiers he saw everyday outside his window in Venice were simply things he _dreamt up._ It made the war seem unreal, to hear about that happening eighty years later and not being able to _do_ anything.

Nico didn't even know what he could _do._

 _There wasn't anything he should do._

(It began to sink into Nico that he was alone.)

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* * *

.

He moved through his classes like a zombie, rarely seeing Bianca except at meals when she was too caught up in her newfound friends to pay her younger brother any attention.

Nico spent most of his time around Anthony, during classes and meal times. Anthony chattered on most of the time, mostly about mythomagic, which Nico had taken to like a moth to a flame. Anthony had given Nico his old set of cards and figurines and they often had impromptu sessions of playing the game that a couple of their classmates, like Jared and Charlie, had sat in on.

Time seemed to move slowly at the school, compared to the eighty years Nico had spent inside the hotel. Everyday dragged on and on, with more time spent sleeping through class after staying up late at night struggling to translate the heady books.

A week went by at school, although it took centuries for Nico, when Bianca came into Nico's room one night after dinner.

"You need to apply yourself to school." She said, glancing at the mythomagic cards on the floor, and the history books under his bed. Nico was curled up on top of the covers with _Relevant Inventions of the Past Century_ in his lap. "The principal came up to me asking if I could talk to you about your schoolwork and participation."

Nico blinked. _Why did the principal just ask me directly?_ "It's doesn't matter." Nico dismissed. "I'm doing fine, I'd say, except for history and science."

Bianca sighed. "Why are you doing so badly in science?" She questioned. "You were so good at our last school."

Nico froze. "Our last school?"

Bianca nodded. "The one in New York. After our parents died in the car crash, remember? We were sent to that school, and we spent time exploring New York. Don't you remember the National Gallery?"

Nico _did._ He could recall memories of running through the halls and getting lost in the subway, exploring the tourist parts of New York City, but he couldn't remember the boarding school.

 _Did the Lethe take this away?_

He stopped. "You just said our parents died in a car crash."

"They did." Bianca let out an exasperated sigh. "Are you going to talk about being in the future again? Nico, you can't just-"

"Bianca, earlier you said we didn't have a dad. We've never known our dad. How could he have died in a car crash?"

Bianca's mouth opened, and shut. She stared at him for a few seconds, before she responded, "I… don't know." She shook her head. "I can't remember correctly. Anyways, don't you remember our boarding school?"

"No." He answered blandly.

"You don't?"

"No, just as you don't remember our parents, I don't remember the school." Nico stared at her hard. "Bianca, something is wrong."

Bianca leaned against the door. She hadn't stepped foot into the room once, and Nico could feel the suffocating distance between them that he didn't know if he could breach. "Something is wrong." She repeated, glancing up at the ceiling. Her mouth was pulled tightly and her shoulders tensed as she seemed to realize something. "Nico, something is _wrong._ This doesn't feel right."

"I know."

"What's wrong?" Bianca asked the air between them.

Nico hesitated. _She won't believe you,_ his gut told him, and Nico bit his tongue as he told her, "I don't know."

(It was lonely without Bianca.)

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* * *

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 **..**

start of a new multi chapter, based on a headcanon of mine. pairings unknown, how far this will go unknown. i kind of squidged on the dates, because RR is wrong on all the dates, so i've switched all the dates on this to fit 70 years, as in nico was born in 1930, he was stuck in the hotel in 1940, he was there for 70 years so 2010 he emerges, duhduhduh. nico was therefore born in 2000 and bianca 1998, as they are two years apart, annabeth and percy are a year older than bianca and are 13, so born in 1997, you get me.

I don't own pjo.


	2. Chapter 2

_._

Nico studied and played mythomagic throughout the following days- his fingers knew the cards just as well as the knew the crumbling pages of the Italian-English dictionary.

There was a dance going to be held at the end of the month, to celebrate the start of a successful school year. To Nico, the way the year had come along was like pulling teeth. Nico wondered when it was going to end.

Bianca, he knew, was excited for the dance.

They had only spoken twice since that second day of school, and Nico spent as much time as he could in the library, not to ignore her, at least not that he would admit.

Being near Bianca was like being at home after someone else had lived there. It wasn't any different on the outside, and the inside was mostly unchanged, but there was something different hanging in the air that had warped it beyond the point to where home was almost not recognizable to Nico. Bianca was different, like a similar but not quite the same forgery of the real person.

She was still his sister, but there was nothing to talk to her about, nothing he could share about his finds on the past century that she wouldn't dismiss or look at him oddly for. He couldn't ask her about the Greek mythology, about their life at home in Venice, she just wouldn't listen. She knew something was wrong, but she didn't know _what_ was wrong, and that was useless to Nico.

Nico wasn't excited for the dance, and was hesitant to see his sister there. He didn't have a choice.

Anthony dragged him to the dance- not to ogle girls, no, they were ten and that was far too gross for them- because that was how they were going to get dinner that night, and while Nico certainly had started to look like he'd skipped one too many meals, Anthony wouldn't.

"C-Come _on_." Anthony pleaded. "We just g-go in, get the f-food, and get out."

Nico didn't seem so convinced. He looked around at the entrance of the dance, which had barely started, and the people inside. Most of them seemed to be older students, like Bianca's group and another group of boys that Nico had briefly seen in the halls. "Are we even allowed in?"

"It's a s-school dance." Anthony told him. "Haven't you e-ever been to one? They're open to the entire s-school."

"Oh." Nico said. "No, I haven't been to one."

Anthony shrugged. "A-Ah. Let's just g-get some food."

Nico and Anthony slid across the walls, trying to avoid the groups in the middle. It wasn't hard for Nico to spot Bianca in the midst; she was wearing a bright yellow floppy hat that Nico had never seen before. A boy and his friend were standing close to her, whispering anxiously to each other, shooting glances at Bianca, which had all of Bianca's friends laughing.

"Neither of them better hit on my sister." Nico mumbled under his breath, scowling at the two.

"W-What?" Anthony asked, as they approached the food table.

Nico shook his head. "Nothing." He waved Anthony off.

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* * *

.

It wasn't nothing, Nico learned. So maybe they didn't hit on his sister, but the two definitely changed the game.

Dr. Thorn was killed by some kid (the same one with his friend who had _goat legs-_ Nico knew because of Anthony that the goat guy was a _satyr_ ) and their friend had fallen off a cliff, and suddenly there were Huntresses and his sister was going with them and he couldn't come with, and it was too much for Nico.

Nico, the forgotten kid who was curled up next to the goat-boy, who had introduced himself as Grover _,_ shuffling his Mythomagic cards in his hands absentmindedly as he watched the other boy, Percy, argue with the Huntresses. Nico didn't even look at his sister when she left with some of the girls, although he knew that she looked back at him.

There was too much going on, and Nico was told kindly by Grover to go grab his things from his room before he left.

"We're not coming back?" Nico asked.

Grover shook his head. "Sorry, kid- uhm, what was your name again?" Grover seemed sheepish. Goatish. Whichever. "You're coming with us to Camp, it's a place for people like you."

 _Time travelers?_ Nico wanted to blurt out.

"Nico Di Angelo." He told Grover. "And what kind of people am I?" Nico nearly sighed at his grammar, it didn't sound right to his ears and embarrassed him slightly. _Just when I thought I was getting a hang of English._

"Halfbloods- sons and daughters of the Gods and Goddesses."

"Greeks." Nico filled in.

"Yeah." Percy shuffled over to the two of them, and Nico didn't look at the other boy. He was maybe a year older than Bianca, thirteen, and he was tall with dark wavy hair and very, very intense blue eyes, and Nico nearly ran as soon as he saw him.

 _That's disgusting._ He told himself. _Not natural, don't think about it. You're normal. Just because he's kind of handsome doesn't mean anything._ Nico wanted to hit himself. _I'm ten._

"R-Right." Nico turned. "I better grab my stuff."

"Be careful." Grover called after him, and Nico gave him a tiny smile.

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* * *

.

He had three pairs of clothes, two history textbooks, _Relevant Inventions of the Past Century,_ and the Italian-English dictionary shoved in a bag he got from Anthony. His mythomagic cards were stuffed in his jacket. As soon as Nico stepped outside he was hustled back over to the Huntresses, where he was pushed into another corner and forgotten.

Nico was used to it.

Bianca was in a tent with Percy and the goddess Artemis, planning or plotting or something that Nico wasn't included in and doubted he would be. Grover was napping by the fire, ignorant to some of the girls laughingly placing flowers all over him. Nico figured that when he woke up he'd be a bush.

There was a wide berth around Nico, but he could hear some of the whispers. "Quiet", "shy", "little brother" was what he heard often, and Nico bowed his head and shuffled his cards.

 _Halfblood._ Nico repeated in his head. _Halfblood._

Who was his father?

Nico paused his shuffling. He stood up, and headed over to Grover, and gently shook him awake, crouching around next to him. Nico felt bad for a second at Grover's sleepy face, but there was so much _missing_ and so much _confusion_ running through Nico, it covered the guilt.

"Sorry to wake you." Nico apologized. "Who's my father?"

"Father?" Grover yawned. "It could be anyone. Hermes, Apollo, Ares-" Those didn't sound right.

 _Hades._ Nico thought.

"What about Hades?"

Grover sat upright. "The Lord of the Dead?" Grover's eyebrows raised, and he looked around for a split second. "You shouldn't suggest such a thing."

"Why not?" Nico was confused. Hades seemed right to him, he had seemed right to him ever since he first talked to Anthony about Mythomagic and that terrible River Lethe, and now that Nico was apparently related to one of them, well, it made sense didn't it?

"About sixty years ago the Big Three made a pack- the Big Three being-"

"Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. I know." Nico interrupted.

Grover nodded. "The Big Three would not have anymore children with mortals, because they were too powerful and too big of a risk. Of course, that didn't last very long. Percy is the son of Poseidon, and there was a daughter of Zeus, Thalia, but she died four years ago."

"Oh." Nico said.

"Yeah, you see why you can't say that about Hades? If you said that he didn't keep his oath, it'd be blasphemy!"

Nico stood up from where he was crouching next to Grover, and dusted off his pants. "Hades kept his oath." Nico said blandly. "He kept it alright."

Grover watched him in bemusement as he left.

.

* * *

.

The Huntresses moved fast. They got them down from Maine to New York in one day, although _how_ Nico didn't understand (he figured maybe it was an eighty-years-later-technology, or possibly just a supernatural thing, so he didn't question it), but it was an enjoyably quick ride down the coast.

They entered through the forest, far away from the road that Grover told Nico was due north of them. They arrived sometime in the late afternoon, when all the other campers were eating dinner, and Nico felt almost as out of place standing outside of the dining pavilion as he did his first time standing onstage helping his mother during one of his mother's shows.

He could hear the whispers of " _The Hunters!"_ and " _Percy and Grover are back!"_ but as soon as people caught sight of him their whispers were quieted and they turned back to their meals.

Nico was too exhausted to be offended.

He was ushered inside of the Big House, where there was a disgruntled god- _Dionysus,_ Nico was filled with childish awe, _oh my god that's a God-_ and a centaur waiting to introduce him, and Nico accepted to watch the welcoming video, because there wasn't much he was too unsure about, but nothing quite distinguishably known either.

"So, we'll get claimed?" Nico tested, after he watched the video. "By our parents? At some time?"

Chiron nodded. Nico absentmindedly wondered how the centaur got up and down stairs. "Yes. Do you by any chance have any idea who your parent could be?" Chiron asked.

Nico hesitated. Grover seemed offended almost, and what if he was wrong? _(He could be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time.)_ "Had-." He paused. "I don't know." _He needed to stop making enemies wherever he went._

Chiron caught his slip up, Nico could tell by the way his eyebrows quirked downwards, just like his old math teacher did. Nico hoped the old bat was in having a good time in Heaven.

"Well then." Dionysus interrupted. "Nathan, go with-oh, what's his face- Lucas Castaway."

Chiron saw Nico's puzzled look. "Luke Castellan. He's the head of the Hermes Cabin."

"And my sister?" Nico couldn't help but ask.

Chiron put his hand on Nico's shoulder. "There's nothing about her we can do."

.

* * *

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End file.
